Vane, Sir Henry, was born at Hadlow, Kent, 26th May 1613. His father, 'old Sir Henry' (1589–1655), was a bustling and time-serving statesman, who rose to be principal secretary of state, but who, having, with his son, been a chief agent in Strafford's destruction, was six months later deprived of his offices, and sided thereafter with the triumphant party. 'Young Sir Henry' in his 'fourteenth or fifteenth year was awakened from good-fellowship,' and at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, whither he passed from Westminster in 1628, appears to have embraced those republican principles for which he afterwards became so famous. His travels to Vienna and Geneva (1631) confirmed him in his aversion to the government and discipline of the Church of England; and in 1635 he sailed for New England—the refuge of disaffected spirits in those days. He was chosen governor of Massachusetts; but his advocacy of toleration, and bias to the Antinomian views of Anne Hutchinson (q.v.), soon robbed him of his popularity, and in 1637 he returned to England. He married in 1640 a daughter of Sir Christopher Wray of Ashby, Lincolnshire; in the same year entered parliament for Hull; and through his father's influence was made joint treasurer of the navy and knighted. Already, however, he had formed a close friendship with Pym and Hampden; and when the Civil War broke out no man was more conspicuous in the military and theological politics of the time than Vane. He relinquished the profits of his office (equivalent now to £30,000 per annum); he carried to the Upper House the articles of impeachment against Archbishop Laud; he was a 'great contriver and promoter of the Solemn League and Covenant' (though in his heart he abhorred both it and presbytery, and used them solely to attain his ends); with Cromwell he engineered the Self-denying Ordinance and the New Model (1644-45); and through the ten years 1643-53 'he was unmistakably the civil leader—that in the state, said his enemy Baxter, which Cromwell was in the field.' So, too, the sonnet by Milton. But he had no share in the execution of the king, and he did not view with satisfaction the growing power of Cromwell and the army. On the establishment of the Commonwealth he was appointed one of the Council of State; but it was largely Cromwell's dislike to his redistribution bill (1653) that prompted the dissolution of the Rump, when Vane's protest, 'This is not honest,' was met by Cromwell crying out with a loud voice, 'O Sir Henry Vane, Sir Henry Vane! the Lord deliver me from Sir Henry Vane.' Retiring to his Durham seat, Raby Castle, he there wrote his Healing Question (1656), whose hostility to the protectorate brought him four months' imprisonment in Carisbrooke Castle. On Cromwell's death he returned for a while to public life, but in the July following the Restoration was arrested and sent to the Tower. Thence he was shifted to the Scilly Islands, and thence brought back two years later to be tried for high-treason. Charles II. wrote to Clarendon, 'He is certainly too dangerous a man to let live, if we can honestly put him out of the way;' and on 14th June 1662 Vane was beheaded upon Tower Hill. Christopher, the youngest of his seven sons, was raised to the peerage by William III., and from him the Duke of Cleveland is descended. Vane's is a puzzling character, for he was a singular compound of a sane and far-seeing statesman, pure and high-minded withal, and of a fauatical and impracticable Fifth Monarchist. Rightly to comprehend him one should study his incomprehensible writings.
See the Lives by George Sikes (1662), Charles W. Upham (Sparks's 'American Biography,' Boston, 1835), John Forster ('Statesmen of the Commonwealth,' 1840), and James K. Hosmer (Boston, 1888).